Coming to adulthood in the nineteen-sixties and -seventies, in an age of scientific, social and political optimism, having been conditioned to believe in the perfectibility of humanity by means of rationality, this boomer belatedly realises that he's been catastrophically misled: this blog charts his efforts to achieve a less vapid, less ego-driven, less dispiritingly parochial optimism.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

All living systems show two opposing tendencies: the tendency to creative discovery, and the tendency to conservative rigidity. Every living system exhibits both tendencies but in widely differing proportions. Moreover, the relation between the two tendencies is not symmetrical: it's fair to say that while creativity requires a modicum of conservatism, too much of the latter can and often does stifle the former completely.

There is, clearly, a difference between making a living and having a life.
Human life is, indeed all sentient life is, to a very great extent about making a living.
But if that's all it is about, then such a life is seriously impoverished,
however successful the living. Making a living implies, as it does in the
natural world, specialisation. For better or for worse, one becomes to a great
extent what one does. We become some identifiable type of human function in the
course of making our living. We are urged, as children to be something.
We do this with greater or lesser degrees of coherence. We become doctors,
lawyers, factory-workers, toilet-cleaners, musicians, artists, astronauts,
beggars, tycoons, thieves and so on. Each of these functions implies a degree
of specialisation and normally, the more complete the specialisation, the more
successfully the function is performed. But if this success is the reward of
specialisation, the price paid is very often the loss of plasticity, the loss of
adaptability, the loss of creative formlessness, creative infinity. We all know
of people who are so completely formed (or deformed) by their professional activity that they
cannot stop performing that particular function. The lawyer adopts litigious
attitudes in his relations with his family and friends. The teacher remains a
pedagogue, even between the sheets. The doctor cannot stop diagnosing illness
and so on. To a greater or lesser extent, we all become a function of our role
in life. To a greater or lesser extent, our minds are structured by our
function. Our function turns into a mental carapace.

We think of knowledge as liberating, but it can turn into quite the reverse. While learning expands the mind, knowledge can frequently limit it. To a greater or lesser extent, we become a function of our knowledge
and see the world through the spectacles that our knowledge imposes upon our
minds. This sort of functionalisation happens not only with respect to
specialised, professional knowledge, it also happens with respect to beliefs of
all kinds as well. The mind operates according to the categories set by the
beliefs and functions and may be unable to stand outside of them. Often
such functionalisation of the mind – though necessary to making a living –
results in rigidity of attitude, all kinds of orthodoxy, dogmatism and
occasionally, bigotry. The efficient and successful performance of a function often correlates with the degree to which the mind in question is
‘orthodox’, ‘dogmatic’ or ‘bigoted’. Less than whole-minded commitment
diminishes efficiency. The result of all of these limitations on the human mind
is a diminution of both the world inhabited and of the self that inhabits such
a world. When it goes too far, functionalisation is a matter of living as a
part self in a part world, living as a fragment in a collection of fragments.
Such functionalisation, when yoked to the paranoid emotions of the ego can become a negative, damaging state in which each specialised individual pursues individual goals to the detriment of others. When belief in the thing-ideology and the fragmentation it engenders intervene to reinforce this negative development, the individual becomes
the famous cog in the machine and the result is quite simply catastrophic.
Dehumanised units interact mechanically with each other according to the forces generated by
the immediate tensions to which they are subject and humanity disappears.

The mind is always in danger of becoming no more than a
function of its beliefs and when the ego is in control of those beliefs, its
craving for power is such that, to talk mythically for a moment, it ousts God
by assuming his role. There are only these two possibilities, given the
propensity of the mind to become functionalised by its beliefs: either the ego
fuses with the self and the self recognises its dependence upon an overarching
meaning to which it is subservient, or the ego sees itself as sole authority,
the sole origin of meaning in the universe and abolishes God in order to take
his place. By ‘God’ here is meant no more than a meaning to the universe that
is not simply that of the ego. God’s place is taken by the ego’s claim to
godlike knowledge and what goes with it, god-like control. The scientific ego
is the last refuge of anthropomorphic religion; here the ego has fused with the
anthropomorphic god. The ego as quasi-divine lawgiver arrogates to itself the
omniscience and the omnipotence of the monotheistic deity. Its mechanistic
universe is ruled by laws that it has itself created. These laws are forced
upon the rest of mankind by so-called ‘proof’, a form of violence that is
generated by nothing more authoritative that what appears self-evident to the
ego and that thus frequently means no more than ‘true because I say so’. What
is self-evident to the ego is what it makes itself, namely its machines, either
the literal machines of technology or the intellectual machines of theory. So
the whole business of ego-authority goes around in a circle and the authority
of ego-based intellection is simply the mechanical propensity of the ego. This
is as close as the ego gets to the status of ens causa sui. It is an
indication of the vacuous nature of an attitude that declares that parts are
more important than wholes: the ego as part imagines that it is entitled to
legislate for the whole and for no good reason than that it both desires to do
so and lacks the ability to conceive of any power above itself. Since the ego
can only work with machines and since the machine is necessarily a
demonstration of its own validity, the ego imagines that the mere appeal to
machine models will be exclusively authoritative. The functionalisation of the intellect makes
every thus functionalised ego infallible in its own eyes. The result is both a
cacophony of little tin gods shouting at each other and a leaden knee-jerk consensus that is the essence of orthodoxy. Daily human life is
analysed in terms of a range of mechanical problems. These problems are
provided with mechanical ‘solutions’ by a variety of tin-pot deities. The
result is that daily life becomes, increasingly, a perpetuation of the very
problems that the solutions were intended to solve. The reason for this is that
the root of the problem lies within the ego and its reductive, mechanical
methods: the rationalistic ego is, in the words of Karl Kraus, “the disease of which it thinks
itself the cure.”

Just as the ideology of mechanism imposes a mechanical
conception of the processes of nature and just as the thing-ideology imposes a
fragmentary view of reality, so the functionalisation of the person succeeds in
rendering all human beings mechanical and fragmentary as well. It must be said
that the success of the ideology is as notable here as it is in the scientific
sphere. It must also be said that the catastrophic effects of functionalisation
on the human self are as extensive and profound as the effects of mechanical
modes of understanding on the environment. The two go together and complement
each other perfectly: the practical policies that result from mechanical models
cooked up by a myopic, hidebound science are implemented with robotic
efficiency and soulless disregard for the fine balances of nature by the
truncated ego- and persona-dominated beings to whom they appeal. The greatest
danger in the human realm today is the possibility that this combination of mechanistic
ideology, mechanised society and mechanised personalities will supplant, by
virtue of their very simplistic efficiency, all other ways of viewing our
world. If this happened and if
centralised political power on this planet were of this cast, it would be time
to bid good-bye to all those vague but precious notions, such as ‘environmental
ethics’, ‘human rights’, ‘the freedom of the individual’, ‘the sanctity of
life’, ‘the mind’, ‘the creative imagination’, ‘the human spirit’ and so on,
which make the functionalised ego sneer, but without which we humans would be a
lot nastier and certainly less creative than we are. These concepts already
have a difficult time of it, but they survive because decent, unprejudiced
people know they are valuable, even though there is no room for them in the
officially scientific view of things. The day this language goes on the wane
and begins to disappear from public discourse in favour of the efficient
language of function and technique, that is the day humanity will begin the
first stage of its congealment into a stagnating or self-destructive species.

It may well be that the human species will split into two,
the one continuing to grow and develop, the other, like the coelacanth settling
down to long-term stability. It may be that that process has already begun.
Whatever the case, the functionalisation of the human person strangles
creativity, reduces the range of the personality to that of a routine-ridden
calculator and chokes off that indeterminate, unpredictable, innovatory input
into the world that is the essence of our interaction with our environment. How
then does the wholly functionalised mind operate? It operates, primarily, by
adhering with almost evangelical fervour to the implementation of a certain procedure,
a certain method, a certain algorithm: it computes. The specific nature of the
functionalisation is given by the role, the persona. The energy for the
sometimes almost fanatical zeal for method is provided by that would-be
divinity, the ego. The combination of functional efficiency and ego-ambition is
one of the most potent in the human world today; and it is this combination
that could result in the imposition of the universal totalitarian machine
portrayed in literature and film from Plato’s Republic to Skinner’s Walden2,
from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to the ghastly visions of the Matrix
films and of all those other popular stories of ultimate societal mechanisation.
The extent to which such scenarios are viewed positively or negatively depends
upon the degree of mechanisation of the personality doing the viewing. The
point of view adopted here is the following: far from representing a positive
view of the future, such nightmares are wholly negative since they represent
attempts to achieve, for whatever agency or ideology it may be, a control over
humanity that will lift it out of the creative mainstream of evolution and
consign it to the class of no-longer-developing creatures. And that – at least
for humanity as we know it – would be a very bad thing indeed.

So how does functionalisation of the person work? It works
by developing, to the detriment of the self as a whole, the rational,
methodical aspects of the intellect – the left-brain aspects, in the language of brain-mythology – and
by linking these so firmly with a certain role within a certain organisation or
a certain type of organisation, that the person concerned is entrapped and enslaved - bought, body and soul. It becomes incapable of thinking outside of a certain
box or outside of certain boxes. This role is defined as a series of procedures
for which the person has responsibility. This sense of responsibility is
cemented by many types of reward, financial gain, status, power, influence and
the like, that are craved by the self-worshipping ego. The old animal passions
that stoke the ego – territoriality,
aggressivity towards any competition, self-importance, self-regard,
vengefulness, greed, and the like, on the one hand – and the distortions that
result from the truncation of the self from its own depths – paranoia and
schizoid dissociation of intellect from emotions, on the other – create an
extremely efficient, intense but dangerously unstable state of mind that is a
diminution of the human. It is a diminution of the human because it constitutes
a loss of that distance and ‘beyondness’, a loss of the finite-infinite
tension, that always characterises the relation of the self to its own
products: the infinite self externalising itself in finite productions. The functionalised personality is pure persona, pure ego and the
robotic attitudes that go along with this are deeply pathological, however
‘normal’ they may be considered in our western industrialised societies. The
instability of a functionalised personality depends upon the strength of those
creative forces of renewal that are part of the birth-right of the self, and on
the degree to which the function has conquered or subjugated them or otherwise
keeps them in check. In certain functionalised personalities, the function
cannot keep the transformatory forces in a state of repression and they break
out (often in a ‘mid-life crisis’) either in positive or in negative form,
either as creative innovation and departure, or as destructive illness. Both of
these latter types of dissolution of the function are relatively rare. The
functionalised person usually has too much to lose by allowing cracks in the
persona to appear. Those who do allow such slippage either achieve something
radically different from their functional prowess or else they suffer some kind
of breakdown and consequent demotion or disgrace.

The functionalised person in short is a mechanised mind.
Small wonder, then that it tends to develop conceptions of the mind that are
mechanical. Its first level of programming is that of the theory of
three-dimensional space, one-dimensional time, and reality as a collection of
three-dimensional solid, persisting objects. This basic operating system of the
mechanised intellect, laid down in early childhood, is then reinforced by the
acquisition of language and becomes the basic set of assumptions used to
approach the world of experience. The next level of programming comes from
education and depends upon the degree to which the personality concerned adopts
mechanised attitudes and mechanised thought-patterns from the milieu in which
it grows to maturity. Those persons possessing a facility for procedural
matters, algorithmic thought-patterns, convergent, rule-governed thinking of
all types will tend to flourish in an educational milieu where such things are
valued and where proficiency in them is rewarded. Educational success,
throughout, will have been measured in terms of the efficiency with which the
person convinces the educational authorities of its ability to conform to
received standards of excellence. The ‘passing’ of examinations, generally no
more than the reproduction of rote-learned factual information or the
manipulation of procedural technique, will further reinforce the sense of
achievement of the already deeply functionalised intellect. The next layer of
programming, however, is probably the most vital, and it is this level that
completes the process of functionalisation: it is the level that is laid upon
the person by professional activity. The need to achieve economic independence
and the ego’s desire for status, drive the already functionalised personality
towards social roles that it can fill with the aid of the mental procedures and
ideological assumptions thus far internalised. The personality is drawn into a
net of forces that provide all manner of feedback loops, which further
functionalise the mind: daily routine, reward, fear of demotion, economic
necessity, social pressure, reputation, authority, deadlines, competition and
so on. The person becomes entirely bound up in the routine of such an
existence, entirely dominated mentally by it and entirely devoted to its partial
values. The result is often either a hard-nosed and ruthless personality who
sees only the achievement of those immediate goals that are imposed by the role
played, or else a stressed and harried personality whose perpetually stimulated
fight or flight mechanisms operate internally and inappropriately to burn up
the body itself.

The thing-ideology and the philosophy of mechanism drive
the procedures and values of the major educational institutions. These, in
turn, foster the functionalised personality. These personalities achieve
eminence both in the educational institutions and in the other organisations to
which they apply their abilities. The mechanised, functionalised values and the
ambitious, energetic ego are highly prized in industry and commerce because
they maximise growth and profit. Governments perceive this maximisation of profit as the
highest good of a country and therefore foster all the values, procedures and
abilities that conduce to its further maximisation. Educational policy,
economic policy and all other sorts of planning then become dominated by the
mechanical outlook and the immediate goals of the functionalised ego. The
result is a drive towards the mechanisation of society from its roots to its
most authoritative institutions, from parenting to governing, from
manufacturing to entertaining, every activity is governed by procedure, by
method, by algorithm; and the intrinsic, indeterminate creativity of the human
mind that is responsible for every positive cultural acquisition is lost.

This tendency of western societies to foster the training
of more and more functionalised persons generates a conception of human
identity that equates it entirely with the persona, with the social role. The
successful person is ‘something’ in society, i.e. a recognisable definable
thing. Personalities are regarded as achieving a state in which they are
‘finished’, ‘formed’, ‘rounded off’. The implication seems to be that once a recognisable
social role has been achieved and filled efficiently, then the person has, as
it were, peaked and can go nowhere else. The person thus functionalised is
entirely identified with the brain with which it is associated and this brain
is considered as a sort of computing device that has been programmed to operate
in a certain way. The functionalised person and the mechanised mind see only mechanism and function; they are self-confirming theories. Inevitably, when the efficiency of this computing device
begins to wane, the person is regarded as waning along with it and hence judged
to be of little use, little worth and, like a clapped-out machine, suitable for the
scrap-heap. The person is regarded as diminishing along with its diminishing
efficiency. The value of such a functionalised person is precisely the extent
to which it can fulfil its function efficiently. Once this goes, the person has
no further value. Thus the old, the sick, the handicapped, the diminished have
no value in terms of functionalised personalities. How long such diminished
persons will continue to be tolerated in a given society depends upon the
extent to which non-functionalised persons and non-functional conceptions of
personal value are maintained. It requires very little for a society to be so
devoted to mechanical values that it begins a process of reification,
objectification or depersonalisation of the persons it regards as somehow
inappropriate to its aims. Thus totalitarianisms of all kinds have
systematically persecuted those they considered inappropriate in this sense,
i.e. not susceptible to being functionalised in the approved manner. Behind all
of these totalitarianisms has always stood some rigid, orthodoxy, mechanically
applied, some mechanistic, algorithmic conception of human life and of the most
efficient manner in which to live it. The
mechanistic-deterministic-materialistic ideology that still governs the west
and the thing-ideology that now constitutes its only authoritative view of the
world, are steadily creating a functionalised population that not only cares
nothing for the indeterminate core of the human self, but also fails to
understand that it is the origin of all that is positive in human culture:
purpose, value, creativity, meaning, and all those forces that foster the
constant achievement of complexity in diversity that has characterised the
history of human culture. The victory of the functionalised personality would
perhaps spell the end of that history; it might spell the ‘end of history’
altogether, in Francis Fukuyama’s phrase.

The antidote to functionalisation is not to be found in
its demonisation or in any set of measures designed to achieve its abolition.
Functionalisation produces many benefits. It focuses the intellect with the
intensity of a laser-beam and this intensity of vision permits an attention to
detail and an unsurpassed analytical ability that are both of great value in
the solving of all manner of ancient human problems – disease, hunger, ignorance,
privation, and suchlike. On the other hand, it is clear that unchecked
functionalisation produces its own set of problems – intolerance,
insensitivity, short-termism, myopia of all kinds, diminution of the person and
so on. The solution therefore would seem to be some means of maintaining the
benefits of functionalisation while reducing its deleterious effects. This can
only be done, it seems, by fostering two mutually opposing manners of thought.
The self has to be seen as potentially governed by contradictory sets of
principles. Once again, the solution to a fundamental conflict in human life is
not the stressing of one side to the exclusion of the other, but rather the
balanced maintenance of both elements of the tension. The procedure-obsessed, methodical,
algorithmic aspects of the personality have to be counterbalanced by its
informal, indeterminate, unpredictable aspects and the two have to be seen as
one.

In circumstances where functionalised thought-patterns
rule the roost – as in contemporary western civilisation – individuals will
tend to see method as the essence of thought. When you have no creative ideas,
you fall back on a method. The logical procedure, the mathematical procedure,
the organisational principle, the managerial method, the recipe, the formula,
the formalism, the routine – all of these will be seen as ends in themselves
and not as provisional thought-patterns, essentially subject to review and
modification. In addition formal patterns of thought will be regarded as
somehow complete and in themselves completely authoritative. Formal thought
will be considered to generate its own internal principles from its own formal
structure. The form will be accorded absolute status. No attention will be paid
to the status of the self as always above and beyond its own formal thought, as
the indeterminate and indefinable origin and creator of all formality and as
the authoritative user and manipulator of such formalism rather than merely its
slavish operator. It is therefore only in the affirmation of the self’s
intrinsic indefinability that such a viewpoint can be achieved. The finite,
limited aspects of the mind have to be seen as dependent upon an infinite and
unlimited background. The essentially extra-systemic nature of the self has to
be affirmed. Once the self is seen as dominated by particular procedures,
particular formalisms rather than as being essentially above them, the self is
on the road to mechanisation and functionalisation. Where thought is largely
driven by repeatable formulae, intelligence has to be seen as the intrinsically
indefinable essence of the self and the indeterminate source of the determined
structures it creates. Intelligence has to be regarded as the unformalisable
origin of all formality. Intelligence is only formalised when it manipulates a
formalism. As the origin of all formalisms, it is intrinsically superior to
them. This is not mystification, it is simply good mental hygiene. Though they
are among our most intimate experiences, we have no clear idea how the innovations
of the human intellect take place. We have no formal procedure for the
achievement of creative advance. We have no way of formalising the production
of new structure by the human mind. Thus we have to accept the gifts of our own
creativity on trust. It is in that sense that the essential nature of the self
has to be considered to be indefinable and indeterminate. Thus any fostering of
the functionalisation of the intellect – and such is vital if the intellect is
to achieve and to master any field – has to be offset by an inculcation of the
essential inviolability of the self, the essential ‘beyondness’ or infinity of
the self, the essential, indefinable value of the self. It is perhaps in the
use of the traditional language of ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ that such a view had been
and is currently maintained in our society. But such language is on the wane
and its vocabulary lacks resonance. We have to find an equally powerful
language that renders the same service as the traditional but now discredited
concepts. The language of physics is perhaps now in a position to do this for
us, particularly where it points up the spurious nature of the distinction
between parts and wholes. If there is
no ultimate separation between the sub-atomic particle as a local manifestation of energy and the entire
energy-field of the entire universe, then a similar lack of separation can be
assumed to obtain in respect to the human being. If the universal energy-field
is imbued with its own universal meaning and ultimately governed by an
indeterminate source of all creativity, then our connectedness to this source
must surely be the antidote to the deleterious effects of our own tendency to
functionalisation. But we have to choose this connectedness.

The functionalised human being is the fragmented human being, the part human being, the human being who is, by virtue of the loss of wholeness, cut off from the world as a whole, from the self as a whole and from humanity as a whole. Such a fragmented human being is responsible for all the ills of the human world today. Such human beings are doubly dangerous in that not only are they alienated and intrinsically distorted, they are also in ignorance or even in denial of the fact. This combination of mental distortion and refusal to understand the distortion is at the root of the cultural malaise of the west and at the origin of its disastrous collective behaviour.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

One of the most dangerous
features of our culture is our loss of a sense of connection with totality, our almost autistic obsession with yet more detail.
We are unhoused and alienated in the very universe that gave rise to us. Increasingly, we think and behave as if we had only ourselves to thank for our existence. The problem lies with the nature of our understanding that views reality through the narrow slit of empiricism. We possess a bewildering array of facts about the cosmos, but the more we know, the less of a connection we have with it. Blaise Pascal was right to be spooked by the cold vastness of space. The more science tells us us about the universe, the more futile it appears. What’s
more, we believe that this purely factual, thing-obsessed conception of the universe delivered to us by scientific geeks is a healthy state of affairs as opposed to that of the
religious or mystical consciousness that sees itself as fundamentally keyed into an intelligent universal process.

The self has to operate in the context of a superordinate
whole. This superordinate whole can be many different structures at different
times. It can be a family, a church, a football crowd, a company, a government,
a school, a factory, a committee and so on. But fundamentally, the self has to
feel itself at home in the universe. It has to recognise itself as a
stakeholder in the universe, rather than just an accidental cog in some small,
arbitrary machine in some obscure corner of the world. People can and do find
significance in their membership of all kinds of organisations, from a group of
regular drinking-pals to the Catholic Church; but fundamentally, when the self
takes into consideration every aspect of its existence, its arrival on the
scene as a result of long and ancient natural processes (natural
selection, heredity etc.), its birth, its short span of conscious life and its
inevitable death, it cannot prevent itself wondering about its place in the
whole pageant of events that we call the universe. It is in the nature of consciousness
so to think. This locating of the self coherently within the universal process
is identical with the impetus to do philosophy, as already noted, and is central
to what we mean by the phrase ‘the meaning of life’. The self has to feel
itself at home in the universe rather than merely desperately building a little
home for itself in a particular social group, a particular town, a particular
country, a particular social role and so on.

Of course, the vast majority of humans are too preoccupied with the daily business of making a living ever to
give a thought to their place in any grand scheme of things. Indeed, the
culture of celebrity, through which our civilisation expresses its principal
values of egoism and possession, is designed to keep people in a state of
suspension of self in which the meaning of their existence is provided
vicariously by those they admire, while they themselves serve the economy as
various types of wage-slave. The culture of celebrity convinces people that the
sense of life is essentially to be seen in terms of fulfilling an enviable
social role supremely well. Since most people are unable to achieve this they
have to contemplate it in others, the rich, the famous, the powerful; and the
media reinforce this practice by their constant harping on the doings of these
people to the exclusion of almost any other issue. Newspapers,
television-screens and radio-broadcasts are dominated by the antics of famous actors,
politicians, musicians, sportspeople, crooks, writers, captains of industry,
the rich and indeed any other kind of individual who appears to have a claim to
eminence of any sort. The non-eminent thus have no significance for the media
and only get into the newspapers if they distinguish themselves or are
distinguished by some event or act that propels them to celebrity-status, however
briefly. The significance of so-called ‘reality TV’ is ostensibly to repair the
gap between celebrity and non-celebrity. That it fails is only in part due to
the personal mediocrity of those who go in for this sort of self-exhibition. It
fails more seriously because the distinction between celebrity and
non-celebrity is a symptom of a wider failing in our society: namely, our inability to
discover the essential dynamics of the self. We lack the means to understand
ourselves and appear to believe that narcissistic egoism is the summum of human existence.

Eminence of any sort is a function of the supposedly enviable
social role of the person concerned, for the meaning of existence in the modern
west is seen only in these terms. Once one has identified a range of human
types as abstractions, which is what the thing-ideology does for the human
species, once one has fragmented the human species into identifiable types,
then the sole meaning of human existence becomes the filling of a
representative role, defined in terms of a particular function. Then, since the
filling of an identifiable social role is the only meaning to life, the
prevailing belief is that the more enviable the role (in terms of popular notions of 'success'), the more meaningful the
life. Any notion that the self could have a unique importance, a unique
destiny, quite separate from its social function, its ego, its persona, its
external relations with other persons and the like, is completely lost.

Now the contention here is this: that the sense of human
life has to do precisely with not
identifying the self with the socially dependent ego or persona, but rather with the self’s own place in the universe as a whole. The persona, i.e. the social function,
is only a means to a particular practical end in a particular specific context
and no more, though it is usually a means of bolstering the self-regard of the
ego. It does have its purpose, but this purpose is a temporary part of the developmental process, like all stages of education. Neither ego nor persona have any intrinsic relevance to the self as such;
they are the causa efficiens in the self's growth, but their relevance is to the social structure in which they are rooted. The intrinsic
and unique self, on the other hand, is completely dispensable to this social
structure, since only the function – the social contribution, if you like – is
of any value. The philosophies of Utilitarianism and Marxism realise this and
exploit it to the full – which is why they are universally regarded as inhuman.
Now the self is precisely not identical with the ego, persona or societal function and
incapable of identifying itself in any way but temporarily with these. The self
requires a destiny and an identity that go beyond social ambition and the
social structure altogether. The persona and the ego inhibit the development of
the self precisely to the degree that they begin to dominate the personality. The essence
of the personality, however, and the focus of any meaning to life is the self.

The self requires nothing less than the ability to see
itself as creatively part of the universal creative process of nature. Nothing less will do. Less
than this is not satisfying to the self, despite its awareness of its own lack
of importance; and it is for this reason that throughout the ages, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, from the I Ching to the modern horoscope, people
have persistently sought to account for their lives, as a whole, in religious
terms or quasi-religious terms, terms that located all the separate contexts of
their daily life within the total context of the world as such. These terms
functioned by invoking those agencies that were thought to be responsible for maintaining
the entire order of nature, whether they were conceived as recognisably divine
or not. It is for this reason that
morals and values have persistently been considered to be dependent upon the
divine, or at least on some universal co-ordinating agency, rather than on any
immediate social context that a person may be committed to and that thus may
have a claim to be valued. Only the myopia of the thing-ideology has blinded us
to the sense and value of these traditional attitudes. It goes without saying,
that so-called ‘divine command ethics’ is merely a mythological distortion of
the essential insight that true morality is a matter of the individual’s place in the
cosmos.

The model of the universe with which we operate nowadays
sees it as a complete process in which many types of apparently independent
systems cooperate to produce a world containing all the staggering variety that
we are able to witness. It is, however, the notion of process rather than
object that is important, since coherent processes amount to something, go somewhere,
achieve something and contribute meaningfully to a superordinate process. We
see the fifteen-billion-year history of our universe as an integrated process,
but we are incapable of working out whether it is a coherent, co-ordinated process, that is to
say whether it amounts to anything, or not. Indeed, we deny actively that this knowledge
could in any way be possible, because the cognitive criteria of our science do not allow it. We think that it is impossible because for
us, reality is no more than a bunch of inanimate objects. Meanings, purposes, values - these are unreal. We deal with this
ignorance imposed upon us by the thing-ideology by convincing ourselves that in
all this process, in which nothing seems ultimately to endure, there are
nevertheless stable entities that do not simply pop into existence and go out
of existence or transform themselves into quite different things. Our ability
to identify at least some stability in the universal flux reassures us in some
small way. These stable entities are the ultimate ‘things’, the building-blocks
of the universe and the rules or laws that govern their motion. So we
elaborate a view of the universe as a collection of identifiable
three-dimensional objects, all of which are made out of some ultimate
three-dimensional objects that hang around for much longer than any others. We
cling to these ‘ultimate’ things with a kind of desperation. Thus we come to regard these fundamental
building blocks as ultimate reality in all the change and as a consequence we
come to regard ourselves as no more than collections of these fundamental
building-blocks. The process that is our self loses all significance because it
is not seen to endure. It has no stability. It has no substance. It appears and
then, after shifting inconstantly, disappears almost immediately and nothing
seems to impart to it the enduring identity of the tangible thing.

Small wonder, then, that we are unable to see ourselves as
parts of the universal process. But the really depressing feature of our supposed understanding of the cosmos is that despite our instinctive awareness that something staggeringly meaningful is going on and that the universe looks as if it is a gigantic put up job, we are unable to allow ourselves any suggestion that the whole system might be intelligently coordinated. And so we are left with an improbable tale of countless improbable accidents piled upon countless improbable accidents which just happen to get things exactly right. This so-called 'Anthropic Principle' is the most mysterious feature of our current scientific understanding of the world and all attempts to deal with it scientifically lead only to yet more improbability.

The Big Bang (which just happened to get the
initial conditions for our cosmos spot-on) produced the first generation of
particles. The second generation suns just happened to have the capacity to produce
the particles that make up our world. (It was the emergence of carbon at that stage that convinced the atheist Fred Hoyle of the intelligence of the universe.) The processes by which our planet came into
existence just happened to be a consequence of the external dynamics of these
particles. The organisation of matter into living systems then just happened to
be another consequence of the same dynamics (though it is not, because the information of the genome has no chemical explanation). The emergence of consciousness –
again, something that just happened – we see as a product of still the same
dynamics. Our lives, our societies, our entire human world just happens then to
be a product of the same dynamics. The staggering series of accidents that we believe produced us
and our specifically human world have nothing at all to do with the
nature of that human world, with what is of value in it and with what makes it
precious to us. The universal process seems to our science completely different from ourselves
and to have no possible relevance to the self. The self relates to other
selves; and the universal process that produced selves – so runs the
thing-ideology – has no resemblance to the self and its concerns at all. It is not surprising then that we view the whole universal process of the universe as
completely irrelevant to us, as completely foreign to us - just another bunch of things to be used. No wonder that we
see the corollary to this as true, as well, namely that our lives, our
preoccupations, our values have no relevance to the universe as such. No wonder, either, that we are fragmented and alienated and that we retreat into
the ego, from where we see the significance of our lives as lying in what we do
every day or in what we aspire to do every day and as having no significance
outside of these activities.

We never pause to ask ourselves, however, whether these beliefs held by modern man are not deeply misguided, deeply
harmful and deeply wrong. The simple truth is that they are; but the conspiracy
of the modern democratic, industrialised society, sedulously fostered by
politicians, pundits, journalists, academics and educators, is to suppress every possible
belief that militates against the thing-ideology and that militates against the
conviction of governments and industries that only an existence devoted to the
production of yet more things has any sense. Modern democracies and modern
industries are obsessed by the production and consumption of things and yet
more things. That is the only activity that has any measurable value and meaning
within the view of the universe imposed by the thing-ideology. In a world in
which things are, at least initially, randomly thrown together by the forces of nature and by
chance, the essence of the human meaning seems inevitably to be the control of the
universal collection of things and the consequent production of different
things by means of our conscious intention; otherwise consciousness is
completely meaningless and quite superfluous. Our identity and our view of
ourselves is now bound up with the ever more frenzied production and consumption
of things. We are things. Our main purpose is the frantic production of yet
more and yet newer things; and all the organisations that constitute human
society have the sole purpose of generating still more things. We have to generate
more things than our competitor. We have to possess more things than our
neighbour. We are drowning in an ocean of things and as we produce them in ever
greater quantities, we cut ourselves loose from the sustaining universe and
pollute both it and ourselves with the by-products of our hard work, our
‘industry’ our ‘growth’, our thing-production.

The power of this social aspect of the thing-ideology is
so great that one begins to wonder whether there is not some greater
significance to it that we overlook completely, some ‘cunning of reason’, to
use a Hegelian phrase. Perhaps, if we think holistically and teleologically for
a moment, the universal process of evolution may require this distortion for
the achievement of some creative leap forward, just as the profusion of the
Cambrian explosion of species was required for the later production of robust
and complex survivors. That may be the case, but one still has a duty to combat
the injurious effects of this fragmentation and the concomitant reification of
the self because those who suffer from and are damaged by it – and they are a
significant number, if not the majority – do not necessarily have to submit to
it. They certainly do not have to believe the ideology that supports it. The
world as a whole, the planet, the ecosystem would obviously be far better off
if human beings adopted a more integrated and harmonious relation to the
natural systems that spawned them and upon which they depend. We see ourselves as foreign to nature,
as apart from nature, as superior to nature in intellect even, but as inferior
to nature in our transience, as locally dominating and exploiting nature, but
as being finally defeated by her (short of making ourselves immortal!); but this is only because we see nature as
fundamentally nothing more than a collection of insensible things, whereas we
are things endowed with consciousness, which is intrinsically more valuable
than things. This jumble of half-baked beliefs about ourselves and our world divorces and estranges us from the world to such an extent that we are incapable of understanding it despite all our science. That is the principal reason why, as it were, we pelt our mother with filth.

The confusion in our own view of ourselves – things, yet
not things – shuts us out of the cosmos. If we could see ourselves and our
consciousness as intimately woven into the universal process, such that every
aspect of our being, mental and physical, is rooted in an aspect of that universal
process and every event of our lives is both influenced by and has an influence
upon that universal process, we would be a little more careful and a little
more concerned to know more about the nature of our connections with that
universal process. This cannot be achieved by considering ourselves as just one
more thing – however mysterious, paradoxical or anomalous – amid a universal collection of things. We have
to be able to understand the manner in which we are integrated into the whole
and the manner in which the processes of our individual life chime harmoniously with the whole. We have to understand how what we consider to be
merely a collection of alien things is in actual fact the dynamic, intelligent milieu
in which we have come to be and which is not in any sense alien to us but
intrinsically related to us. It generated us and it has a place for us. We have
to be able to see what we call ‘matter’ as of the same kind of subtle,
ambiguous stuff as ourselves, not as some inert, brute ore from which chance
and necessity have absurdly extracted us. We have to be able to see mind as a
universal property of the universe as a whole, from its tiniest filaments to its
entire, coordinated flow.

We now believe in the ‘emergent properties’ of wholes; and that is the only handle we can get on minds. But
maybe we are seeing them in the wrong light: in a causal light. We are so
wedded to the notion of antecedent cause, that we think that the so-called
emergent properties of a collection of parts are caused by the aggregated properties of those parts. Of
course if the parts are not present, then the whole effect will not be present,
right? Well who knows? It may be that the levels of complexity achieved by material systems merely
permits the expression of antecedent properties, particularly with respect to mental properties. If reality is inherently
intelligent, then maybe any system resulting from evolution is merely the
expression of a particular aspect of that intelligence. This is the way we view
the cultural formalisms that express our own increasingly complex thoughts: we can
conceive of relativity, quantum physics, multi-dimensional space, black holes
and all the rest because we have the language to express these notions. The
language does not cause the notions, the notions do not emerge from the
language – at least scientists would not thank us for saying so. The
content of these thoughts existed before we evolved the language to discuss
them. If we admit that possibility then it is not difficult to admit the
possibility that the states of mind which ‘emerge’ in the human exist prior
to the evolution of humans and come to expression because the human
body and its brain have come to exist. Since emergent properties characterise the evolution of matter in our universe, it is possible to see emergence at all levels as the evolution of form adequate to the expression of pre-existent content. Perhaps there are higher mental states beyond ours that require large numbers of humans for their expression and maybe that is why the human
race as a whole has emergent properties such as large-scale cultural and societal phenomena. If we extrapolate this logic to the
universe as a whole, then it may be that a network of life-bearing planets is
connected by an emergent property that binds together a galaxy and so on up the scale. We do
not have to view this sort of phenomenon as causal, such that, for example, a
deity is generated post facto as an emergent property of the universe - though this has been speculated. There is
nothing shocking in the thought that the material universe is the medium of divine self-expression. This sort of speculation is inherently no more
ridiculous than the speculations concerning the emergent properties of
termite-hills, crowds, economies or the process of the evolution of species. It is speculation, but something like it is needed to break the choking stranglehold of the thing-ideology. Something like this is needed if we are to make real and satisfying sense of our lives in the universe we observe.

In order to obtain a better understanding of why this is
of vital importance, we will have to look a little more closely at the
functionalisation of the intellect and of the person.

Friday, December 9, 2011

Most ethical theories stop at one
or other of the restricted dimensions that make up the whole context of human
life. They stop at the individual, as in egoism, or at the societal, as in
Utilitarianism or they restrict themselves to the cosmic as in religious or
divine command ethics. Why thinkers on matters ethical feel obliged to choose
one of these or why all of them should not be taken into consideration at once
is something of a conundrum. But then, perhaps it’s not as surprising as all
that, since humans have consistently shown themselves prone to take a
restricted view of themselves and of their world. But our imagination will not
allow us to stop short and be satisfied with some restricted view. The basic
issue is that of doing the best with the mind: this ultimately involves
establishing a creative tension between the three principal dimensions of human
consciousness, the individual, the societal and the cosmic. It is impossible to draw boundaries between these three, but increasingly one or other of them is neglected, as is the manner in which
they interact. It is clear that the question ‘what
is good for humans?’ can not be answered by any individual or societal recipe
for happiness alone, though in contemporary society that is in effect what is happening. The cosmic dimension is more and more regarded as irrelevant. But we neglect it at our peril. We locate ourselves in the cosmos and our happiness is
bound up with what we take to be its character. Locate us in a cosmos that intelligently brought us forth and that has a place for us and we are at ease. Locate us in a
cosmos in which we are anomalous and alienated beings for whom there is no place apart from
that which we carve out for ourselves and we become brutalised and brutal.

It is notoriously difficult to
state what is the good for human beings. It is difficult to define this good.
The problem here lies with our desire for definitions or rather with the kinds
of ‘thing-like’ definitions we desire. This being the case, it is probably
easier to say first what is bad for humans. We won’t bother with metaphysical
notions such as ‘evil’, for there is little need for these outside of a
religious context. It is much more convincing to point out in what way the
thing-ideology imposes certain defective beliefs that are bad for us; for make
no mistake about it: the thing ideology is bad for us. Once we have done that,
we can show why we no longer need to put up with these defective beliefs. If
what is bad for us is the consequence of a defective set of beliefs and a
defective set of assumptions, then arguing or imagining ourselves out of those
assumptions may well open the way for counteracting their effects upon our
minds. Once we have outlined what is bad for us, logically the absence or maybe
the opposite of these things could be good for us.

So what are the bad effects of
the thing-dogma?

One of the chief sources of
damaging disruption to natural systems is the injection into the system of
defective, inappropriate or irrelevant information. For example, viruses
constitute defective information as far as our bodies are concerned and their
disruption of the body is obvious to all. Cancers arise from a kind of
defective information. Similarly, many of the problems and discontents of
western culture arise from defective information, defective beliefs. Richard
Dawkins was right in this to the extent that his ‘memes’ can be extremely
resilient and extremely deleterious. He was wrong in thinking that he could
isolate a certain category of memes – the religious ones – and show that these
are uniquely damaging. It is not the holding of this or that particular belief
in human culture, that makes it damaging, it is the use made of it. It is the case that the scientific dogma
according to which Dawkins operates is a damaging meme precisely because of its
monopolistic domination of areas of life over which it has no right to
pronounce. Thus the bad effects of the dogma are those that suggest that human
life is meaningless and worthless, that despite the deepest convictions of the
human race, its most universal conceptions of the value and purpose of human
life are utterly misguided and untrue.

Of course it is bad for humans to
suffer poverty, disease, oppression and so on; and there are enough people
around the world suffering from these. But to a great extent, these problems
are exacerbated by the moral bankruptcy of the developed west. The concern here
is with this latter and not necessarily with societies at other stages of
development. A basic assumption is that getting the self right in the west will
do much to produce improvements to the global situation. So the goal here is to
address the spiritual and moral malaise of the west and not so much the
consequences of this malaise in the rest of the world. It is to attempt to change
the view that human beings have of themselves as things. To see a human being
as a thing is to deprive him or her of all value and meaning; and it is
precisely these two features of human life that we wish to bring back into the
foreground of discourse. In the west a set of damaging assumptions concerning
human life that grow directly out of the thing-ideology impacts directly on our
psychological health. These assumptions and the beliefs constructed on them
have inflicted on us the intellectual and moral malaise from which we suffer.
This has in turn afflicted us with a whole range of disorders that are the
direct result of what are not only defective and oppressive beliefs, but also
now redundant beliefs.

Some of the assumptions and
beliefs that are bad for us are listed here. The list is not exhaustive.

It is bad for humans:

- to be told that whatever they
may think they are merely things;

- to be told that however they
may feel they have no freedom;

- to be bossed around by dogmatists
or subjected to this sort of totalitarianism;

- to be made to believe that they
are machines and as such, robotically determined;

- to be told that their mind is
an illusion or a delusion;

- to believe that any notion of a
soul or spirit is even more of an illusion;

- to believe that only external
relations are possible with others or with the world;

- to believe that they have only
physical, external ‘material’ relations with any reality;

- to be told that as isolated
objects they are fundamentally alone and cut-off;

- to be made to believe that
their lives have no intrinsic structure or value;

- to be told that only things
have value for them;

- to be made to believe that
their lives have no purpose;

- to believe that the universe around
them is a senseless machine;

- to believe that the universe is
an uncoordinated jumble of things;

- to believe that nature is
governed only by chance or necessity;

- to believe that human
intelligence is a freak of nature and without context;

- to believe that they have no
stake in the order of nature;

- to be hectored into believing
that their intelligence excludes them from nature;

- to be alienated and terrorised
by any or all of the above.

It requires no great insight or subtlety to see that
morality in modern western societies is deeply problematic. Philosophy,
particularly of the Anglo-Saxon variety has pronounced ethics impossible
because values are not things and moral ‘oughts’ cannot be found in nature as
one finds rocks, trees, clouds, turtles, galaxies, viruses and other things. Since
in our culture the only authoritative sorts of sentences are those that
describe things and since in the examination of things, nothing like a value
can be detected, sentences that describe the way things ‘should’ be are
pronounced to be meaningless expressions of knee-jerk likes or dislikes, mere
noises like ‘yuk’ or ‘yum yum’. It has never occurred to the luminaries who
thought up this piece of philosophical nonsense that the problem lies with
matters of methodology, with midworld, that is to say with a particular use of language and not with the absence of value from the world as such. The
empiricist dogma pontificates grandly that only sentences describing things are
meaningful and therefore talk of values is gibberish. But value is intrinsic to
the world and to all its systems. It’s just that the concepts that designate
such value have to be holistic concepts and not reductive ones. Language is
particularly well adapted to talking about objects; but this is the weakness of
language and it should not blind us to the primacy of values.

Pronouncing ethical statements to be meaningless because
they are not reducible to properties of things is about as intelligent as
someone’s pronouncing a move in chess illegitimate because, firstly he doesn’t
admit to the existence of chess, but only to that of tiddly-winks, and, secondly
because the move does not conform to the rules of tiddly-winks. There is a
gaping hole in the intellectual fabric of the west and that is its inability to
talk the language of wholes. The question, ‘what is the good for humans?’ is
therefore a very western question, because it implies some identifiable thing
called ‘good’ that can be isolated, as an electric charge or a pungent odour
can be isolated along with all other partial things and defined. Thus the good
for humans has variously been called ‘happiness’, ‘pleasure’, ‘power’, ‘wealth’
or some such ultimate irreducible thing that can be obtained, like any other
commodity, by some mechanical procedure or other. According then to the logic
of the thing-ideology, this ‘good’ is deemed to be obtainable for all humans by
the application of a set of rules, just as a chair can be obtained from a tree
by following a distinct procedure or set of prescriptions.

True to the reductionist methods that dominate intellectual
life in the west, we can conceive of the good only in terms of identifiable
goods, even to the point of taking that word quite literally: the good is goods.
We should have the courage to turn this cast of mind around and invert the
reductive spirit in ethics. We only pursue our manic focus on parts because of
our prior understanding of wholes. Indeed, the concentration on parts is
actually in the service of the understanding of wholes, though we tend to
forget this. We understand instinctively that health and happiness are good for
man, but we mislead ourselves in identifying those states altogether with what
we imagine are particular attainable examples of them. Just as health is not
the optimum condition of any one organ, but the complete and harmonious
functioning of the entire body and mind, so happiness is not the acquisition of
any one aspect of the whole range of potentially agreeable things. We want to
know when we ask what is good for man, not what might give him pleasure or
satisfaction, what might gratify or entertain him, what might enhance his
self-love or increase his feelings of self-worth. We want to know what
happiness as a whole, on the analogy with physical health, may entail for the
human being as such. We shall therefore ignore the individual goods and try to
understand the holistic conception in virtue of which every individual good,
from the acquisition of an object to the experience of oceanic ecstasy is
understood to be of value.

Western ethics, apart from suffering from the handicap of
having been pronounced ‘nonsensical’ by western philosophy, suffers also from
the Greek and Judaeo-Christian input that the Middle Ages bequeathed to us. In
Ancient Greece, the fundamental ethical question was thought to be ‘what is the
best kind of life for a human?’ or ‘how does the individual human flourish?’
The answer to this question was thought to be found in the acquisition of a
particular kind of technical know-how; for Plato it was knowledge of the Forms, for Aristotle it was the development of adaptive patterns of behaviour called
‘virtues’ or ‘excellences’. For the Jew and the Christian, however, the
fundamental ethical question was rather ‘what does God command me to do?’ And
these ‘commands’ were understood to be codifiable rules laying down the best
kind of life. These two conceptions of the good life are vastly different, but
they had one thing in common: both the Greeks and the Judeao-Christians busily
went about trying to establish a method for obtaining the right kind of
knowledge in question. As always when humans apply their reason to such
matters, however, this led to reductive definitions and punitive prescriptions.

So while the Greeks taught that a certain kind of learning
resulted necessarily in the individuals' becoming ‘good’ in the sense of
‘successful’, or ‘well turned-out’, and in their ‘living and faring well’, the
Jews and then the Christians, following the monotheistic notion of a divine set
of rules for everything in the universe, set themselves the task of clarifying
these rules, imposing them on everyone and enforcing them. (And Islam, as a latecomer, is still trying to do this.) Now while the
Christians retained the Greek conception of the good life for human beings,
considering it simply as complete conformity to the will of God as interpreted
by the authority of the Church, in post-Enlightenment Europe God dropped out
of the picture and the ego took his place. The good life for a human being became a life of
desire-satisfaction and the rules turned into a procedure for ensuring that the
desire-satisfaction of every individual member of a given group did not damage
the mode of desire-satisfaction of the majority.

This grotesquely impoverished notion of ethics combined
the worst of both the Greek and the Christian views on matters ethical. It
designated the individual as a unit of pleasure-seeking and announced that,
since no one unit has a greater right to pleasure than any other unit, the
pleasure-seeking of each unit had to be controlled in such a fashion as to
ensure that the greatest amount of pleasure was obtainable by the greatest
number. There was of course no compellingly authoritative reason for this at
all. It was simply a hang-over from the old Greek and Christian ideas that the
good was to be obtained by some sort of procedure and constituted some sort of
knowledge; and this knowledge was assumed, particularly by Bentham and his
Utilitarians, to be available by scientific means. It was to be acquired by
means of the so-called ‘felicific calculus’. Since the search for factual
knowledge was deemed to be the amassing of the finest-grain unit facts and
combining these facts according to some rules, the same was thought to go for
ethics. The ‘facts’ were those that the ego deemed to be the facts of human nature,
namely that each human being, as a kind of atomic unit of humanity, was
motivated by an entirely selfish desires for kinds of pleasure. Bentham
believed that all the individual satisfactions could each be given a score and that
on the basis of some ill-defined arithmetic these scores could reveal some
optimum state of society, just as the properties of atoms combined them
together to form a world. This caricatural conception of human life remains the
dominant ethical theory in the west today – albeit without the wacky
mathematics – and is an indication of the extent to which, in desperation,
westerners are liable to believe the veriest nonsense merely because they have
no other means of intellectual control of reality than the thing-ideology.

What, then could the alternative be? What alternative view
could we develop of the good for human beings if we ditch the thing-ideology
and learn to speak the language of wholes?
The reductive language of fragments that is imposed upon human beings by
the thing-ideology suggests to each individual that he or she is completely
cut-off and alone as an object among objects and has only external relations
with other individuals or atomic units and all the other ‘ills’ resulting from
the thing-ideology listed above. The result of belief in this fragmentary view
of life is that each individual feels obliged to exploit every situation as an
opportunity for personal gratification, since there is no other value. This
personal gratification has no other substance than the obtaining of certain
types of commodities. The ethical ideal of the average western individual is
thus officially viewed as the acquisition and consumption of a certain sum of
these commodities. Of course, an extra ethical dimension is bolted on to this
in a completely irrational manner, which states quite flatly that one person’s
acquisition and consumption of commodities must not damage another person’s
chances of obtaining and consuming commodities. There is no particularly moral
justification for this from the basic ideology, which is purely egoistic, but
it is bolted on nevertheless, because even the thing-ideology has to recognise
that ethics has a group dimension that it would be absurdly inefficient to
ignore.

One other reason for the utilitarian inhibition of egoism
is also, of course, the mechanistic need for predictable organisations: society
in utilitarian ethics is viewed as a well-oiled machine – since everything else
in nature is an efficient machine – and it would seem that pure egoism as a
social principle could not work very well. It becomes evident from an
understanding of this fragmentary approach to reality, that not only can it not
really deal intelligently with the dynamics involved in the relation of
individual to group, it cannot understand human life in any way at all, because
human life is only comprehensible as a series of integrated systems that go
from particles to cells, from cells to organs, from organs to the body, from
the body to social groups, from social groups to cultural groups, from social
and cultural groups to the world, from the world to the totality of nature and
the cosmos; and without some way of integrating all of these systems, it is
impossible to grasp what is good for the individual human being and for the
human group. It is as arbitrary to cut off the ethical questioning at the
societal or cultural level of systems as it is to declare that it belongs to
the individual alone. Every human being is aware that questions concerning the
good for humans go from the individual through the societal to the cosmic
without any obvious boundaries and they do so because it is in the nature of
human self-consciousness to situate itself in these contexts and to understand
them holistically.

Some sort of realisation is dawning that a holistic
language and a conception of complex feedback loops is needed with respect to
recommendations concerning human behaviour, for example in the ecological
movement, but it needs to be much more consciously and much more systematically
developed in conscious opposition to the fragmenting effects of the
thing-ideology. The ethical phenomenology of the human race has to be
considered as an emergent property of the most complex thing in the whole known
universe, namely the human being, not just singly, but as a whole species. And
let us remember here that these properties are called ‘emergent’ by us only
because our habit of looking at every whole in terms of what we identify as its
simplest parts makes wholes challengingly mysterious. Each sub whole of
relevance to the human being, from sub-atomic particle to planet, has to be
regarded as essentially and fundamentally connected both to the immediate
subordinate whole and to the immediate superordinate whole and, thereby, to the
totality both at the micro and at the macro scale. There is a flow of
information from all levels of the system to all other levels. The flow of
information is from what we call ‘the simple’ to what we call ‘the complex’ and
from the complex to the simple. In reality, there is no such thing as the clear
distinction between ‘the simple’ and ‘the complex’, for the simple can behave
in complex ways and the complex in simple ways. There are no ‘fundamental
building blocks’ to nature, no ultimately ‘simple’ bits, the properties of
which, along with the rules of their combination, govern all phenomena. Wholes
at all levels have irreducible emergent properties that cannot be understood
reductively. Parts are only apparently parts; they are in fact either sub-wholes
or superordinate wholes depending on the
point from which one views them; and this relation of parts to whole is an
essential property of the entirety of the biosphere, and, we must assume, of
the universe as a whole.

The life of the individual human being is set in a nested
series of systems, each of which has to be considered as a whole that is not reducible
to its parts. Moreover, each whole has either to be viewed as a sub-whole within a superordinate whole, rather than merely as a part of that whole, or else as a superordinate whole the parts of which are its sub-wholes. As for the wholes relevant to ethics, there is the
body, to begin with, then the family, then the various larger social groupings,
after which comes the ecosystem of the planet and thereafter the universe as a
totality. The idea that the individual human could somehow seek integration
into the universe as a whole is not as barmy as it sounds when one realises
that according to the de Broglie interpretation of the individual particle,
each particle reflects the whole universe in the information encoded in the
wave-potential that accompanies it. Imagine, in order to put a bit of reality
on this abstract notion, what is indeed the case: the light from every visible
source in the universe, the light that encodes the information concerning every
object in the visible universe, is present at every point within the universe,
for every part of the visible universe can be observed from every other part. Thus
every ‘part’ of the universe that we experience is present in every other ‘part’. The information
governing the entire universe is present everywhere in the universe,
holographically present, if you like. A human being can not be fully human
without feeling ‘at one’ with each of the systems of which it is a sub-whole.
The good for a human being is therefore a living sense of belonging to each of
the systems in turn in which its life is set, from body to universe. The link
between each of these systems is information-processing or intelligence, the
intelligence specific to the level in question. The old notion of man as the microcosm
mirroring the macrocosm returns in new guise if one considers the notion of ‘self-similarity’
in chaos-theory. It is one of our deepest instinctive conceptions of ourselves
that suggests to us that the relation between our creative minds and our earth-bound
bodies might be a dim reflection of the relation between the physical cosmos
and the universal intelligence that animates it.

The intelligence of the individual is not just
brain-function, it is rather an aggregate function of the indeterminate
information that accompanies every particle of the individual’s body, a
function of the complex information-bearing field that fundamentally is
each apparent part and that is connected to the indeterminate intelligence of
each superordinate system above it. The information-bearing field that is each
apparent part unfolds itself to us in ways that are peculiar to our particular
ability to experience. We experience a world of separate things – that is our brain-imposed
handicap. But our experience can be trained to broaden itself and become an
experience that the self has of fields, of the universal field. We can
experience the universe as universal light, universal energy, universal
intelligence, and its various phenomena, ourselves included, as bound forms of
these. This is a kind of myth, and will be rejected with cries of “juvenile
idealism” or something similar. But the mechanistic dogma is a myth, too, and a
destructive one. The holistic myth proposed here is the sort of myth that is needed
to counteract the corrosive and fatal effects of the mechanistic-deterministic
thing-ideology.

It is a consciousness of the integrated totality of the
universe, in which the individual has a stake and a role, that has the
potentiality to combine all the disparate elements in ethical theories as diverse
as Utilitarianism, Natural Law ethics, Kantianism, Virtue-Ethics, Divine
Command Ethics, Situation Ethics, Egoism, Prescriptivism, Anarchism and so on.
It can combine deontological and consequentialist notions. It can combine
prescriptive and descriptive ethics and abolish the spurious distinction
between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. It can do these things by the simple
expedient of not restricting knowledge to knowledge of parts. The forces that
forge the many moral codes that exist and that have existed in human groups
have the purpose not only of connecting the individual to a system, but also of
revealing and imparting to individual life a structure, a purpose, a sense, a 'meaning' if you like, that is inherent to it and not simply imposed for the convenience of this or that
power-hungry authority. Whatever the Existentialists may have said about the
lack of a human essence, there has to be an essence of the human in order for
life to function, though this essence clearly is not identifiable with any one
aspect of human existence. It is precisely the doctrine of meaningless that has
given rise to the existential notion of absurdity and to the view that
fundamentally ‘anything goes’ except where the majority has decided – on the
basis of its superior power – that in the interests of its comfort, certain
things will be forbidden. The good for humans is therefore substantially the
opposite of everything proposed by the thing-ideology and is found in a
rediscovery of the ancient values of spiritual connection with universal
meaning. That it is physics that can begin to make these things comprehensible
demonstrates that we are not dealing here with mere mystification, but rather
with intellectually serious matters of vital importance that we have no reason
any more to obfuscate with any half-baked ‘scientific’ dogma.

When one has got rid of the pusillanimous notion that the
only good for humans is vegetable health it is fairly easy to see that what is
good for humans is the same as what makes their existence meaningful: it is being
dynamically and permanently aware that the self-conscious mind is integrated into
the cosmos and thus actively involved in its ceaseless creativity. There
is no more consummately meaningful, no better life than to be in creative
partnership with the creativity of the cosmos. To create, to be creative, for
us humans is to be created, even if we know it or not. The cosmos is infinitely
varied and infinitely complex because it is a process of constant creation. We have a stake in this perpetual creativity
whether we understand this or not. Clearly, it is better to understand our
status as created creators than not.